Snowflake was written from the ground up to be a novel and advanced cloud data platform provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Snowflake enables data storage, processing, and analytic solutions that are faster, easier to use, and far more flexible than traditional offerings.

In this nearly nine hour course, we talk about how Snowflake is a true SaaS offering. Specifically we address:

- How there is no hardware (virtual or physical) to select, install, configure, or manage.
- How there is virtually no software to install, configure, or manage.
- How maintenance, management, upgrades, and tuning are handled by Snowflake.
- All important aspects of Snowflake
- How Snowflake runs completely on cloud infrastructure. All components of Snowflake’s service (other than optional command line clients, drivers, and connectors), run in public cloud infrastructures.

Our goal was to get you up-to-speed with Snowflake and prepare you for the Snowflake Certification exam with a 250 set of practice questions and scenarios. When you finish this course you will have a solid understanding of the Snowflake environment, be ready to administer your own Snowflake environment and be prepared for the Snowflake Certification exam. I recently passed the Snowflake Core Certification exam with a score of 90% and the questions included in this course were invaluable as a study guide.

In addition to the above, we cover more specific areas such as:

- Separation of compute and storage (the power behind Snowflake)
- Virtual warehouses (compute instances)
- Scaling up and scaling out
- Zero-copy cloning (a feature unmatched by most any other competing platform)
- Data sharing
- Snowflake credits and billing
- Performance tips
- Clustering keys
- Data loading and unloading
- Structured and semi-structured data
- and much more...